Day 2: What Would a Health Coach Do?

Today’s Plan: Intermittent Fasting Variation

To keep up the momentum in the right direction (and early success was a significant factor in individual weight loss overall success) I’m going to try a smaller time window for eating. This is a version of intermittent fasting that was useful in a number of recent studies, though the effect was more powerful in overweight people. You might want to check out this link to an interesting New Scientist article on the topic.

In this diet, you don’t worry so much about what you eat, but rather when. One common schedule is to eat for eight hours and fast for 16. Not what a lot of us normally do, grazing on food from the time we wake up to bedtime. Instead you’d, say, eat a late breakfast at 10:30 a.m. and then finish an early dinner by 6:30 pm. That’s all!

Personal Experience

Putting off eating in the morning is normally easy for me, though with yesterday’s exercise bout, it’s harder this morning! Evening stopping eating is way harder. I’ll report back how I do!

New Exercise Guidelines and Comment on Yesterday/Today’s Numbers

It’s easy to lose a pound in a day when you exercise like a crazy person and burn some 600 or maybe 700 exercise calories. That’s not sustainable for most people, of course. Not for me either. But it was nice to be able to do an a.m. workout and then a long, hard afternoon workout, too. A great kickoff to doing more consistent exercise!

We need more exercise/intensity/variety than most people are aware. Did you know that new guidelines are out? This is the subject of one of my health and wellness IQ quiz questions, take the quiz to see what you know

Here’s an excellent resource on the new exercise guidelines from Harvard Health blog.